Stakeholders decry impact of climate change on Agriculture
Chima Azubuike
The Director-General of Nigeria Agribusiness Group Dr Manzo Maigari, said all over the world, climate change has become a major challenge to agriculture, adding that it’s equally the biggest contributor to climate change.
According to him, in the third world, a major contribution to emissions that caused climate changes is unsustainable farming practices such as bush burning, high level of post harvest losses, long turn around stand due to lack of infrastructures to remove farm produce adding that if the roads are good, it will also reduce the emissions associated with agriculture.
Maigari made the disclosure at a two-day training for women, youths and smallholder farmers in the North-East on the theme: inclusion in agribusiness with the objective on advocacy to increase women, young farmers and agropreneurs’ agricultural productivity.
He said, “The Nigeria Agribusiness Group is moving from region to region across Nigeria to bring in critical stakeholders who are the youths and women particularly but most importantly smallholder farmers who constitute seventy per cent of the players in the agricultural sector; to understand the dynamics and the challenges that come to bear on agriculture.
“We want to hear from them so that we can take their ideas and their views and develop contents with which we can advise the government on policy direction.”
While urging Nigerian youths to engage more in value chain agriculture as means of earning sustainable livelihood, Maigari added that venturing into agribusiness is more like a gold mine for agropreneurs.
“We want the youths to understand that the biggest business around now is agriculture therefore they can go into it and make a sustainable livelihood. The norm in our society before is that it is the poor man that farms but it is no longer so. The reason being that we have seen agribusiness as purely a farming or production affair but it is in value chain development that we have the real money so young people do not necessarily have to be on the farm themselves but can invest in value chain and processing to create brands that can be globally competitive and give them sustainable livelihood,” he said.
On his part, Engineer Ochuko Odibo, the Head of Segment, Climate Smart Agriculture said the group has deliberately chosen women and the young men to participate in the program because they are the future of this land.
Odibo said, “We are looking at smallholder farmers, we are not targeting big farmers.
So far, we have been able to look at several issues in the area of nutrition, climate smart methodology and technology, insecurity and how it affects the farmers as well as possible additional financing from Carbon credit as a means of getting something extra to do their farming.
“After this training,we are going to set up a follow up team that will monitor progress and how they are implementing what they have learnt here today on changing their style of farming by going into climate smart agriculture.”
One of the participants from Smallholder women farmers Association, Malata Adamu, commended the organisers of the training, adding that “it came at the right time when farmers are preparing for the farming season.”
